Cian [00:00:02]:
What's up everybody? Welcome to AROYA Office Hours, episode 134, your one stop shop for cannabis cultivation education. I'm your moderator, Cian. I'm joined by our resident cultivation experts Jason and Seth in the studio today. How's it going guys?

Seth [00:00:17]:
Good man.

Cian [00:00:19]:
And then we have a special guest for the day, Willy Strober from Willy Stober. Sorry, that just keeps rolling off the tunnel like that. Willy.

Willy Stober [00:00:26]:
Sorry.

Cian [00:00:27]:
Willy Stober from Stober Engineering. How are you doing today, Willy?

Willy Stober [00:00:31]:
Great, great, great to be here.

Cian [00:00:34]:
Fantastic. Well, I think let's start out Willy, by having you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and where you're from.

Willy Stober [00:00:43]:
Yeah, so yeah, my name is Willy Stober. I'm from Sonoma county in California, which is about an hour north of San Francisco. My background's in mechanical engineering. I'm a P.E. out here in California and I have been sort of traditionally in my career involved in like building energy and thermal load sort of analysis to support design and research for code regulations and whatnot. And then about, I guess it's been like three years or so ago I got the opportunity to get involved in a PG&E funded study to kind of understand indoor cannabis cultivation, energy use and thermal loads so that the state can be better about knowing how to fairly and most effectively regulate it or put in standards to help consumers. And so I spent about two years sort of heavily studying a facility that had Arroya on it. So and yeah, I'd say out of that I learned a ton because we, it was, you know, funded by the state, so we got an opportunity to look into a lot of things that people probably wouldn't have paid us to do otherwise.

Willy Stober [00:02:15]:
So got a lot of good opportunity to look really deeply into the thermal loads of apotranspiration and how H Vac systems should be designed to most effectively and efficiently satisfy those conditions. And I also, so I got to know the owner pretty well where we were studying and asked him if I could do some more work for him just like on my own. And so I've been doing that for the past year or two and just gone more deeply into other things and to still kind of centered around H Vac and environment. But I've also had the opportunity to look at all their harvest yields and compare the environments of different harvest success and try to find some patterns around environment and soil moisture percentages and EC as reported by Arroya. And so yeah, I've gotten a pretty, I would say well, rounded view on the Connection of H Vac and growing.

Cian [00:03:29]:
That's awesome. It's a really important area of study that you're looking at and it's going to become more and more important as energy becomes more expensive and it's going to become more regulated in our industry. Without a doubt. And I mean, I just had a conversation with someone today that, you know, the whole thing centered around how he's managing thermal loads in his facility and how much energy or money he's spending in energy costs, trying to manage that. So it's really, really relevant topic for sure.

Willy Stober [00:03:59]:
Yeah, yeah. Because there's the direct, you know, energy costs from the owners. But I would say even more impactful is that I don't know if the science is 100% defined yet, but the ability to precisely, and I would say kind of provide a stable environment can lead to substantial yield improvements. Or the other way to look at it is if you're not controlling your environment and you expose your plants to drastic fluctuations, you can risk, you know, drastic harvest failures. And, and if you look at that over the course of a year, that could be, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars for like a 5,000 square foot flower room. So, yeah, that direct energy cost and then just the maintenance of your good yield numbers is as H Vac can be very impactful.

Seth [00:04:59]:
Absolutely. I think one thing, Willy, that I'd like to get into a little bit with you is how difficult it is to, to scale up some of these systems because we're, you know, when we talk about blowing up any kind of action to a whole room, switching lights on and off, turning equipment on and off becomes really difficult to manage because now you're hitting a point where you're maxing out your sensible load. You don't have anything left in the event that you're going to go have an out, you know, an extreme outside weather event or something like that that requires more interior power pole to deal with. And I think that's something that's like, that's one area you really delved into. What are some of the big challenges you find as people try to go above? You know, you mentioned the 5,000 square foot, but what happens, we hit like 15, 20 in terms of trying to balance all this equipment.

Willy Stober [00:05:46]:
Yeah, I would say like, and I'm speaking just from, you know, stories I've heard because I personally haven't been a grower, but I just know, you know, before everything was legalized and people were doing it on a smaller scale, they were using the decoupled model standalones and split systems, and maybe they could open a window here or there to equalize the environments. But once you start scaling up now, you've entered the realm where you need commercial equipment. With commercial equipment comes increased complexity of operation. So some of the challenges is now, as a grower, not only do you have to know the science and botany of growing, but now you have to try to understand the physics of how my air conditioner is operating. Because not only is it a commercial piece of equipment, but it's a piece of equipment that should be operating at ranges that normal commercial, you know, office commercial equipment is not really operating. You know, it's got to satisfy a lot of sensible load and low latent loads early in the growth cycle and then be able to switch towards the middle and ends of the growth cycle to high latent load, low sensible load. It's got to be do lights on and lights off, you know, throughout the day. It's got to treat the environment as the plant is fluctuating its evapotranspiration.

Willy Stober [00:07:16]:
So it's. I would say that's maybe one of the biggest challenges is if you're a grower and you don't have the expertise on your staff, because this stuff is even hard for a engine engineer. So a grower, it's kind of a tough. Did I cut out for a sec? I just got a call.

Seth [00:07:37]:
You're good?

Willy Stober [00:07:37]:
You guys hear me? What? You guys hear me fine?

Seth [00:07:39]:
Yep.

Willy Stober [00:07:40]:
Okay. So as a grower, it's like you're not only trying to understand the physics of air conditioning, but you're trying. You're. You have to understand it on maybe its most complicated application. And on top of that, there are. I don't know, I don't have, like a wide. I don't know every manufacturer, but some of the manufacturers don't quite understand what these units need to be capable of doing. So, at least in my experience, the challenge has kind of been this interdisciplinary knowledge required to not only know growing botany, but what is.

Willy Stober [00:08:20]:
What should my h. Piece of equipment be doing, and what is it doing right now? And is that right or is that wrong? Because you could have the best design system in the world, but if it's doing something weird, then it's no good. So. Yeah. That answer your question?

Seth [00:08:37]:
Yeah, I think so.

Willy Stober [00:08:38]:
Yeah.

Jason [00:08:39]:
And to add to that complexity, I mean, we've got two things that have always challenged me when trying to help people do H vac stuff. And first off is genetic preference. Right. You can't just do the math and say, oh, this is going to be the perfect environment.

Cian [00:08:55]:
Right.

Jason [00:08:56]:
Sometimes that answer of whether you're doing a great job or not on programming that stuff is did the end result give me better quality and better quantity of that strain? And obviously taking documentation of that as well. And then another one, I know the site that you've worked on, that I've worked with you a little bit, doesn't necessarily have copy paste rooms. Copy paste rooms are what I consider when you have brand new build out and all of the hopefully dimensions are very similar, H Vac equipment is the same. Right. You know, what are your steps as far as starting to work with those non copy pastes when you've got rooms that have different numbers of H Vac units or different types and capacities.

Willy Stober [00:09:40]:
So from the study we've sort of defined, you know, what are the important internal loads to characterize in these spaces. And as you could probably guess, it's the lights, the plants and the fans. One of the outputs of the study was to try to kind of derive like a theoretical load that the room should have been giving off had it been given the proper environment, which was challenging because in these spaces, and I'm sure in a lot of other facilities, they're not really achieving what their goal is. So if you just study the empirical data, you're not really seeing what it could have been. So that was kind of the goal of the study was to kind of be okay. If this room was given the best environment, what would it have its evaporative transpiration rate would have been. And the way we did that was kind of piece together like the really good days throughout all the cycles that we captured. So with that, with that theoretical evapotranspiration load, with your lighting load and fan loads, and then the third maybe most critical thing is, you know, what are your temperature set point goals and relative humidity, basically your VPD and temperature, because those significantly affect like the physics of what your unit can do.

Willy Stober [00:11:08]:
So if we're looking at like an existing room that already has equipment, then you basically, you have what your capabilities are kind of restricted or defined. So at that point it's about understanding what can my piece of equipment do exactly, and how do I manipulate my room in order to exist in a range that my piece of equipment can satisfy. So that might be like reducing the number of plants, taking out some lights, or switching the type of lights to change the heat and then changing set points. So maybe I really want that 7450 at the end of the growth cycle, but do I ever Achieve it. And I don't know, maybe not. So maybe, maybe what's more important is that I provide a stable environment that, where I'm not necessarily hitting those ideal set points, but I'm not presenting a situation where my, my piece of equipment's struggling and maybe doing weird things. I'm, I'm giving it something it can handle. And in that way you're not getting like the exact temperatures you want, but you're getting a more stable environment, which I would say is probably the better trade off.

Willy Stober [00:12:24]:
So I guess in summary, it's like, how do I, if I have my piece of equipment defined, how do I manipulate my room, the lights, plants and set point to, to meet what it can do?

Cian [00:12:39]:
I think that's a really interesting way of looking at it because I think a lot of people traditionally try to think about like, what equipment do I need to be able to make this room perform? Not so much how do I manipulate my room to make my equipment perform the best. And I think that's a really unique perspective to look at. Manag your H vac systems with because it is going to allow you to ideally make the most use of what you have. Right. And that's something I love talking to people about all the time, is, you know, not necessarily going down the road of making massive changes, but how do you, how do you get the most bang for your buck out of what you've already got going right now?

Willy Stober [00:13:20]:
Exactly. And it's like, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Seth [00:13:22]:
Oh, sorry. I just wanted to build. CN said and say there's a, there's a huge part of all this that I think gets lost because there's so much technology right now being throw at cannabis growers. Like we're in terms of agriculture, we're the ripest market to throw new things at, right? Like, hey, try, try a subsonic vibrator for your plants. Try like, you know, we could go down all kinds of weird rabbit holes that like, those things have no traction in greater ag. But they're trying to compete in the cannabis space because there seems to be more money to spend on things like that. But the reality for the growers is exactly what you're talking about. What can you do with what you have and finding out where those realistic limits are.

Seth [00:14:00]:
Because if you're operating in a facility that's under spec, the strategy to fix that might cost a lot more than you can afford and there might actually be practical fixes. Like you said, pull some plants out of a room, change up your lighting, start trying to do some ROI benefit analysis on okay, if I buy that new Dehu is that can actually get me where I need to go. You know, start doing some math on that.

Willy Stober [00:14:23]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one thing like that in my experience, because I've come from a non growers background and one thing that I've noticed in this industry is that like the metric of success is that people, lots of people use different metrics. Like they'll say pounds per light or pounds per canopy, square foot or. Or what pounds per plan or whatever. And to me it's all about pounds per square foot of that room. Because at the end of the day as a grower, it's like I have a certain square footage allotted to me and maybe an existing piece of mechanical equipment. How do I get the most pounds per square foot out of that space? Whether that's 80 plants per table or 50 plants per table, you know, whether that's 50 lights or 100 lights. So it's like to me, that's the simplest way to put it and kind of speaks to the ROI process that you're speaking of is that you need to have like a very defined metric as your goal to start to do these manipulations because it's, you know, it can be non intuitive.

Willy Stober [00:15:32]:
Like at the facility I'm studying, they were using like 120 plants per table for the longest time. And then I think they had like some sort of mistake with the cloning where now they had to do 80 plants per table. And then it just so happened that that was like one of their best on an absolute basis, one of their best harvests. So they're like, oh, like I think that there's something to that. So their per plant was like way higher and then their absolute na buds and everything was higher. And so their, their dollars per square foot was absolutely higher with less plants. So it's just an example of how there's so many parameters and variables and so like. Yeah, to just kind of have one metric as a beacon of success I think is useful.

Jason [00:16:24]:
Some of the work I've done with you is it's kind of one of the reasons I absolutely love kind of the systems we've built here. And really what it comes down to is. Yeah, you know, for me, being a grower and a slightly technical person, I might even be somewhat technical more than slightly. You know, we're thinking about the theoretical and then the implementation side.

Cian [00:16:47]:
Right.

Jason [00:16:48]:
You know, obviously the engineering side, like you said, you start off with the theoretical and then the implementation side is, you know, Just a grower getting it done. And you've done a really great job bridging the gap there with the people that we're working with in Sacramento and you are working with. And I guess for me, it's really, really cool because, you know, the system where we're capturing enough data that you guys can realistically build models out that end up in better implementation. It's just so fun to see that biology and that physics get tied together.

Willy Stober [00:17:23]:
Yeah, yeah. And I was lucky to be exposed to a facility that, you know, already had AROYA, because now I'm getting more into the industry and I'm meeting some growers that are, you know, not using it or even like, hand watering or. And so I'm like, oh, that. That wasn't like a typical. Because the data is invaluable if you know how to use it, because you can very clearly see connections of certain things that allow you to put value on stable H Vac control. For example, one of the things that we noticed was that if we had. We were looking at the daily drybacks over the course of a bunch of growth cycles and we saw some growth cycles where, like, the H Vac failed at night for some reason. So it got really cold for like three or four days before it was fixed.

Willy Stober [00:18:16]:
But what that did is it like, permanently affected the drybacks of the plant so it couldn't achieve, like, the high, like, I forget what the percentages were, but like 20 or 30% drybacks that in the most successful harvest you were seeing. So you can see that as you're speaking, that, like, connection to the biology and. Yeah, and I agree. That's why I love working in this space because it's like, super, super interesting and, like, satisfying to, like, see these patterns and then actually see things that keep showing up and things that really confuse people and because there's just so many parameters and once you can isolate and see what it is that's actually happening, it's very satisfying.

Cian [00:19:06]:
Definitely. I'm kind of curious because you were talking about how it's a little counterintuitive sometimes, the types of optimal decisions that end up coming or the optimal results that you end up with in terms of decisions you're making with these control systems or your H Vac implementation. And, um. Is there anything, it sounds like it at least, that maybe came out during your research that really surprised you that you maybe had, you know, different conception of how that was going to look going into it?

Willy Stober [00:19:41]:
Yeah, I mean, I. One example pops in my head that I've actually come to realize recently, and I should say this with a caveat is this is like very recent work, so needs to be vetted out a little bit more. But in the process of doing this study I've come to without any ties to manufacturers or anything, I've just come to realize that an integrated system which does the cooling and dehumidification in one system versus a decoupled is the better way to go. Which kind of puts you at odds with the standalone dehumidifier market. But what I've studied sort of recently as a part of code work is that they're actually standalone dehumidifiers can in that if when you really are trying to hit that cold and dry environment in the last two weeks, even though the standalone dehumidifiers are giving off heat during the lights on space, which you would think would raise the load of your rooftop unit, you actually can reduce, not insignificantly like by a decent amount the total tonnage required of your rooftop unit. If you utilize standalones during the last two weeks just because changes the characters of the. The what we call the sensible heat ratio, which is basically the ratio of of dry heat to wet heat that that ends up at the unit. And essentially even though the total load is higher going to the unit, it's a condition that's much more efficient for the unit to satisfy.

Willy Stober [00:21:30]:
So the balance actually lowers the total tonnage of that unit. So. So that's something that was kind of non intuitive to me because it gives off more heat, there's more load and the space. But the compressor's tonnage is actually dictated by not only just the load, but what condition of air it's seeing to remove that load from. If that makes sense. And it's kind of without going into all the details because it's kind of can start to get complicated the psychometrics of it. But that's kind of the been an example of maybe the more impactful thing to con to realize in these spaces that is that you're and I know this has been spoken of a lot but your set point, the room air conditions are very significant and in understanding what your units can do and the conditions that are there, if that makes sense.

Cian [00:22:30]:
Absolutely does. And I follow that it would absolutely have surprised me to realize that that's going to allow you to have a lower tonnage capacity on your rooftop unit. Just employing those in those last few weeks, I mean I've always personally felt that like employing units those last few weeks is a great way to supplement existing Infrastructure, for example, if you don't have the capacity to be able to pull more out of the room with your rooftop units. But I would have never guessed that it actually helped make a smaller capacity or smaller tonnage unit more applicable in that space.

Willy Stober [00:23:12]:
Yeah, and I again with the caveat that this needs to be looked into more. And it, and I would say there's a big. It depends, but I think normally it's. If you're trying to go for that really cold and dry, then that's usually the case. But there's some cases where it. That doesn't pan out. So it would have to be looked at on a case by case basis. But there are for sure cases where.

Willy Stober [00:23:36]:
Well, I don't want to say for sure, but there's cases where that is, is true. And I know, you know, I'm not the first one to think of that. I studied it because there was another engineer who said that that's what he does on projects because it basically, if you're designing a room from, from, from scratch and you're looking at this type of system you need to buy and the ductwork and all that, you can reduce the size of the coils and the fans and everything if you implement, or this is what he says, if you implement standalone dehumidifiers in the last two weeks, only that because they don't really make sense in the other parts of the cycle. But just the last two weeks, lights on, you can actually reduce the size of that unit and the subsequent, theoretically the infrastructure to support that equipment as well. So you might end up with a lower cost system. And yeah, that's what he does and that's kind of why they had me look into it. And at least theoretically at this point I see what he's saying.

Seth [00:24:44]:
I think that's where some of this gets really interesting because we're dealing with different equipment types that operate with different levels of efficiency in certain ranges. And if you were to look at a lot of this on a base level, like okay, face level, I'm plugging all these machines in. Each one is supposed to provide me with a certain amount of capacity, okay, face value from the manufacturer, that capacity rating is at a certain temperature condition. Now that I've shifted it to a different temperature, different humidity condition, I'm probably going to have to have a learning curve on, okay, how does this machine actually react to those set points in this given space? And then what am I looking to optimize? It's especially when you get outside in environment involved, that gets really interesting. I've worked with a lot of people in like Arizona particularly. That's a fun example where they have the exact same problems as or exact opposite problem, sorry as Sonoma county has, for instance, like they don't have fog ever. They don't have humid nights, you know, totally different. So like how you're going to manipulate your AC versus your dehuse to maintain a certain amount of heat and humidity totally changes.

Seth [00:25:47]:
And I think that's one thing that it's, it's good to know about going into it, but you're going to learn it one way or the other trying to operate any of these systems and then moving past once you've understood like, hey, I've got some different set point manipulation I've got to do with my different systems that are decoupled. It makes sense for a lot of things to be working in unison. You know, I can take my AC off of not only temp, but humidity now. I've got a few more metrics to play with and a few more variables. However, I think the frustrating part for a lot of growers is there's just no real, you know, everything we talk about on this show and I'm sure you've talked about, just like you mentioned, like, hey, this, you know, I, I can't say the science is 100% there yet on this. There's always a. But there's always a caveat where it's like, hey man, if, if 10 out of 10 things aren't in place, that last 11th piece isn't going to do anything for you. And that's really difficult to balance when you've got all these variables and so much information out there flying at you that's saying, hey, here's an easy fix.

Seth [00:26:45]:
Well, a lot of easy fixes were lucky. You know, that's kind of how it turns out totally.

Willy Stober [00:26:51]:
Or they worked in the summer and then they don't work in the winter. Yeah. And I would say one thing that I'm really interested in getting involved more in is the integration of all the systems in a facility. Like if you have Arroya, if you have different air conditioning units and integrating all that data to one platform so that you can better understand all these variables and how they interact with each other and why certain things work and why they don't so that you can gradually get to the point where you actually truly understand what's going on. Because I think without the data, the human brain just isn't capable of cataloging all these things and, and seeing I think humans are very good at seeing patterns, but we're not. You know, when it starts to get above a certain scale, you know, like 10, 20, 30 different variables for one room, it's, it's, it's impossible. So you need a computer, a system to catalog all this stuff and in a way to look at it all. Because I would say my personal philosophy, like, speaking towards your point about, like, okay, we can design it a certain way, but if this isn't right, then it's going to not operate properly.

Willy Stober [00:28:13]:
I think the better way to design is like you design, you do the due diligence to characterize all the loads, but you give yourself some wiggle room with the understanding that you will have a system implemented to monitor and understand what's happening, and then you'll have the ability to recalibrate, to change it and get it dialed in. I think having this concept of like, it's going to be perfect from the get go does a disservice to the design process as a whole. If you're more like, okay, we're going to get it 80% of the way there and then we're going to also implement a system to monitor it very carefully and then have the ability to change things up or the understanding of my equipment. So I know, I know what needs to be changed. I think that's a better way or a way to do things that makes sense to me.

Seth [00:29:07]:
Yeah, it's, it's coming together, I would say, in the space. You know, part of it, I think that's tough is, you know, when you get outside of cannabis and control the ag, there's just not as much money out there to really put towards developing some of these more cohesive systems. So, yeah, that's where expertise has to come in and help us identify where, where we need to be making some of these changes and how you actually work with a particular, I'm not going to say system, because most facilities have a set of systems that you're now, you know, not just you, but any grower is the link between, hey, I've got four different systems trying to operate in unison. I've got to figure this out. It's similar to, you know, maybe learning how to play an instrument.

Willy Stober [00:29:50]:
Yeah.

Seth [00:29:50]:
Except, except without, without good directions, you can't go buy a really good book to tell you what the notes are. You kind of got to like pluck a string and listen and see if it sounds good.

Willy Stober [00:30:00]:
Yeah, I like that analogy.

Cian [00:30:03]:
I like to talk to you about that all the time. I tell People, I use the phrase institutionalized knowledge, where, you know, if you have someone that has spent a lot of time designing, building out and operating a facility, they're going to have a lot more intimate knowledge of the right chords to pluck in that analogy. Right. To be able to produce the result that they're looking for than someone who's walking in fresh from a theoretical perspective where they understand set points, but they don't necessarily know how all the combined systems in that specific space are going to work in concert to help them achieve that goal.

Willy Stober [00:30:44]:
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I think I was speaking to earlier. This space is special in that in order to be effective, it requires a lot of interdisciplinary knowledge of, of what they're trying to do, the growers are trying to do, and also what these H VAC units are trying to do. And, and because if you have one without the other, you could be missing a lot. Like, that's kind of how I was when I started this study. I just. There was a ton of things when I just.

Willy Stober [00:31:12]:
I remember because we had all the sensors and stuff installed, and then I got like the first month's worth of data and I went through it and these guys were having issues with their climate control and I was like, oh, this is the reason why and this is what's happening. And okay, we got to figure it out. And then two months later, I look at the next batch of data and I'm like, what the. This is like completely different. And I didn't even understand the concept of evapotranspiration. I understood what it was, but I didn't really understand how much it varied. But, um, so it's like if you're without that knowledge, you're can be completely befuddled by, you understand H Vac and all that stuff. You're like, what in the hell is going on? Um, so, yeah, it's.

Willy Stober [00:31:59]:
I completely agree to have that, you know, facility experience, to sort of feel out these. All these unique, different situations with these facilities with different types of units in one room, and you kind of got to feel it out.

Seth [00:32:14]:
Oh, one thing, I just interrupt for a second, jsa, because I think Willy can really comment to this coming from the outside, the cannabis, like, indoor growing community, specifically when you started to come in and study some of these facilities, the H VAC setups, efficiencies. Did you ever go look for, you know, historical literature and knowledge on greenhouse operation and indoor growing operation? Because, like to say, because that's my background and coming into cannabis, my mind has been Blown because we've been able to push it in ways that like people just literally had never studied 15, 20 years ago.

Willy Stober [00:32:51]:
Totally. Yeah. There's not a lot on cannabis that exists. But yeah, I did do a lot of other research. I can't remember exactly what I, I think I just basically looked at all there was on cannabis specifically, but also read some stuff on like tomatoes and whatnot. I, there was this study or this procedure that was super interesting. I don't remember what the paper was or who did it, but they had, they've had whatever thousands of growth cycles at this point to study. So they had made a matrix of environmental conditions and harvest success so they could see precisely what environments lead to the best results.

Willy Stober [00:33:39]:
And like how, how much do I need to push it? Because maybe if I'm keeping things at like 75, 60, I'm getting a great harvest, but if I bump it up to 80, 70, I get a little worse harvest. But now my system short systems are much less complicated and easier to maintain than they they had done something like that, which I think the cannabis industry, I'm sure there's people who've got it dialed in like these big growers and operators, but I would say as an industry that there isn't a lot of literature out there that sort of speaks to the exact conditions that are required. I, it's, I, I, I don't, you guys would know better than me. But like I would say it's kind of like somebody's secret sauce at this point. This temperature set point says yeah, well.

Seth [00:34:30]:
That and then just simple things like Jason, I worked in the same greenhouse. The evolution of that. There's another greenhouse build out, similar plans. Guess what? The next one had better ventilation. Why? Because the first build out was built on a system that was, hey, this company had been building greenhouses that you could use for you know like my background plant breeding and research. We just never push the demand nearly as high as cannabis growers are capable of because we got a crop that's actually worth it to push that. So when you started, you know, start looking at, you know, evapotranspiration rates and D here requirements for different rooms, it's like holy crap, we can go, we can actually keep pumping this guys, the more energy we put into this system, the like everything has to increase to a level that you know, surprises anyone who's dealt with like traditional regular ag greenhouse development and indoor grow facilities. And outside of cannabis, let's face it, how many crops were grown indoors under artificial light? Yeah, very Few, you know, and if so, like, how many, you know, you got your, your Gotham's Greens types out there, but over, over the last 20 years, you know, all the concepts in regular ag for like microgreens production or indoor vegetable production, it has to be very circumstantial for that to actually work out economically, you know.

Seth [00:35:45]:
Yeah, yeah. Like if we're talking about the US like, you know, we're in eastern Washington here, could we have a lot of vegetable greenhouses here? Sure. But we're going to have to burn natural gas to keep them warm. There's going to be energy input costs compared to how much gas does it take to grow a tomato in eastern Washington versus grow in California or Mexico and transport it here. And unfortunately, sometimes the answer is, well, it's not worth it to grow that particular crop here. But with cannabis, it's, you know, in any given market, it's still worth enough that you can actually push. I mean, we're looking at getting, you know, 110, 120 grams a square foot is our, like, square foot, grams per square foot is our metric we try to refer to here for the most. And obviously there's, yeah, you know, important ones to other people.

Seth [00:36:28]:
But rewind it 10 to 15 years and that was an incredible amount of biomass to be getting out of one of these, you know, indoor grow systems. And I'm sure we've got, you know, plenty of growers out there say, oh, I was nailing four pounds of light 20 years ago. Sure, I'm sure those existed. But on, on average, hitting those numbers was very, very difficult. And most growers didn't have access to a facility that would let them do that. You know, this level of H vac control, this level of CO2 supplementation control, sealed rooms, like the whole nine yards. And I, I know for my journey, just getting into cannabis, it was quite, quite surprising. You know, from H Vac requirements to how much fertilizer are we dumping onto these plants to.

Seth [00:37:12]:
It's a whole different approach. And like I said, unfortunately, the, the directions aren't that. We're just getting to the point where you can get good, I don't want to say good advice, good directions, good written literature that tells you, hey, case example, here's what happened. Here's, you know, some useful information to actually help you because up until very recently, everything was just under spec.

Willy Stober [00:37:35]:
Yeah, that's honestly one of the things I love about the industry is it's kind of a wild west, as you said, it's getting more defined. But as someone who's kind of new in this industry, it's kind of exciting for me to be on the forefront of acquiring that knowledge and seeing these trends and whatnot. And. Yeah, it's just. It's really cool, like, because other work that I've done is, you know, with, like, office buildings or, I don't know, universities or whatever, and, like, the impact of H Vac. They pay whatever for their energy bill, and somebody might get a little cold and they got to put on a sweater or whatever. But in this space, it's like, it's one of the main ingredients in success. It's the foundation of success is your ability to control your environments.

Willy Stober [00:38:26]:
And then on top of that, it's very complicated, too. So I just. Personally, I think it's super fun. And then you have the connection to an actual living, breathing, you know, thing, and then how well it's doing. So it's like, that's. Yeah. One of the things that I love about this space and what's cool about Ganis, because, yeah, like you said, the price per pound is such that it allows for an investment in. In this type of research and whatnot.

Willy Stober [00:38:56]:
And as. At least at this point, the energy cost is still high, but it's not like, you know, not like tomatoes grown in the Netherlands or whatever where. Where I think, like during the. The Russia Ukraine war when natural gas started to go up a bunch, like you said, their whole business model collapsed. So, yeah, it's really cool space to be in.

Jason [00:39:24]:
A couple things here, Seth got me all distracted thinking about why the other greenhouses had some different ventilation. And a lot of it was because the graphs that I was looking at and the influence they had before we made the purchases on those greenhouses.

Seth [00:39:39]:
Big dead bands. Real big ones.

Jason [00:39:41]:
Yeah. So, you know, in the. The first greenhouses, all we had were gable vents. Right. And gable vents, if you're familiar with greenhouses, or.

Seth [00:39:50]:
No ridge vents either. Yeah, out there. Yeah.

Jason [00:39:54]:
You'll love that statement in and out the long way. But, you know, obviously they. They open fairly slowly and they close fairly slowly, and we're letting in lots of volume. And so we either have to operate on. On very, very small adjustments or we get big swings. Right. So, you know, what I was seeing was obviously this. This red line, and we were operating under our.

Jason [00:40:16]:
Just our. Just our big pad vents. And so the second greenhouses, we threw in some actuated, just some quick actuation.

Seth [00:40:27]:
You got a third line to show humidity, too?

Jason [00:40:30]:
No.

Seth [00:40:32]:
On those greenhouses, I was pretty huge.

Jason [00:40:35]:
But so what we did was we threw in some, I think they were 4x4, just quick open vents.

Cian [00:40:41]:
Right.

Jason [00:40:42]:
So I could either be on or off. Right. And those allowed me to make, you know, really quick adjustments. Right. And so when we think about how much overshoot and you know, in with the equipment you're working on, you can probably implement PIDs for some of this types of stuff. I didn't have that, that option with, with our controllers at the time. And so it was like, well, you know, if I need, just need small micro adjustments, we can use those, those quick action events and operate them, you know, 10, 15 times a minute really if I need to.

Seth [00:41:15]:
And, and do it reliably.

Jason [00:41:17]:
Do it reliably.

Seth [00:41:18]:
Existing non specialized equipment like that was a, that was a small upgrade that had a huge impact.

Willy Stober [00:41:23]:
Yeah.

Jason [00:41:24]:
And so, you know, when we think about, all right, you know, how do you take as much data as you can and distill it into improvements like that? You're, you're doing exactly what you said. You need to grab as much of it as you can and then start to identify which ones are related.

Cian [00:41:39]:
Right.

Jason [00:41:40]:
And you know, fortunately in the upgraded greenhouses, I ended up putting sensors up towards the front of the greenhouse and towards the middle of the greenhouse. I was also implementing those substrate sensors. And when we start to identify which ones are related, we can start to isolate that like you were talking about. And that's really what gives us the insight on to which of these changes should we invest on. Right. Is it worth it? Is overshooting by 5 degrees, you know, detrimental to our optimal transpiration rates? And like, like Seth said, obviously when we compound that with humidity when we're working in greenhouses, specifically things, things start to get more than, than humans are really good at analyzing. And yeah, I think, well, and the.

Seth [00:42:27]:
Reality is for a lot of these systems, we're talking about these dead bands, these green lines and this first green line, Jason Drew, that's where efficiency lies. And when we start to go out of these ranges cumulatively over the run, we're just stacking up more and more time spent an inefficient condition. And that's why you see, you know, on these macro level studies where you're looking at like, well, what kind of environmental conditions promoted this or that, a lot of times I'll go back and look and say, hey, we got to throw out 50% of that data. Like why? Well, you guys couldn't keep it inside of a 10 degree deadband? Like, okay, exactly. There's another variable, guys like, you know, we got to chip away at this.

Willy Stober [00:43:03]:
And it's, yeah, totally that.

Seth [00:43:04]:
And that's, yeah, it's an endless journey.

Willy Stober [00:43:07]:
Everything I studied, everything I studied was imperfect operation, basically like a good couple days and bad. So it's like, it makes it very challenging to derive very solid correlations.

Seth [00:43:21]:
That real world data is important though, because that tells you what can actually be done there. And you have so many case examples to do it right. Like if you can collect that data without Willy rolling out with a clipboard and a camera on site every day now you can actually spend your time working on that.

Cian [00:43:40]:
And making meaningful impact is like now with the type of crop registration that you've got with the Roy, you're able to overlay all these graphs on one screen, see exactly these types of patterns forming as you're noticing these things happen in real time. And the cool thing is that that knowledge now exists in you. And when someone asks, hey, can you look at my graphs and tell me, you know, where my efficiency pitfalls are? You're going to have a good baseline knowledge of what that looks like in the patterning of those graphs and as well how to overlay data in a way that makes it easy to see all of those factors.

Willy Stober [00:44:21]:
Yeah, I totally agree. I think the ability to, because, you know, you were getting to the age where a lot of analysis and things are done by machines. But I think it's very important to visualize data in such a way that a human can intuitively understand what's going on. Because at the end of the day a human, even if you are doing AI or machine learning, the human's got to set up what it is that they're looking at. So the ability to visualize your data is sort of the first step, I, I would think in that process is because you need to see the data and you see a couple sample days, you're like, oh, I see this happening. So now let's, you know, put some algorithm in there, whatever, that looks at the whole data set and looks for these patterns specifically. And, and then, and once you can vet it out over your entire data set, then you know you're onto something. But I just think there's so much power and properly visualizing data in a way that a human can intuitively understand.

Willy Stober [00:45:25]:
And I would say that outside of like just the practical utility of it, there's, I don't know, there's something satisfying about it from just like a humanity standpoint. I feel like as humans we're like, we're made to recognize patterns. So when you can display data in such a way that allows you to see those patterns, it's like it taps into something innately human. Yeah. Huh?

Seth [00:45:52]:
I said graphs, not spreadsheets, you know?

Willy Stober [00:45:55]:
Exactly.

Seth [00:45:55]:
I love using that example, like changing.

Cian [00:45:57]:
That red line to that green line. It's one of the most exciting things to see happen in real time.

Willy Stober [00:46:04]:
You know what I mean? Exactly.

Cian [00:46:05]:
You quantifiably feel how, you know, satisfied you are with actually being able to create the result you were after and totally on board with it.

Jason [00:46:18]:
And even more satisfying, you know, especially in the cannabis space, is these lines.

Seth [00:46:27]:
Represent something a little negative sign next to that one there is very important for your business.

Jason [00:46:33]:
And as we move from one color line to the other, it also has the corresponding financial gains.

Willy Stober [00:46:42]:
Yep, exactly. Yeah, that's. Yeah, it's very satisfying. I come from a world of consulting and one of the thing I didn't love about it, you know, we'd be in either really beginning or an existing project or whatever, and we'd write these big studies and tell them what they should do, but we never had fee to go see what actually happened. And that's what I love about this space is that you, because of like the iterative repeatability of these facilities, you get to see things happen, you get to see the results. Like, as you were mentioning, you get to see the results of what you did. And I don't know, for me personally, there's nothing more satisfying than that.

Cian [00:47:29]:
I think that's awesome to say, man, I would say we are all after the. The same thing there and probably all of us get the same amount of excitement getting that red line to go head towards the green one. Whether it's Argro or someone that we're consulting or just helping with. One question I wanted to toss at you before I forget to do it. As a result of the studies you put in, what do you think we're going to be seeing as far as regulations coming down the pipe at our industry that we can look at in terms of managing our H VAC systems better?

Willy Stober [00:48:06]:
Yeah, I would say it's going to be maybe twofold that I don't. Yeah, I don't know if I would get in trouble. I don't think I. Yeah, I'll just speak from what I would say. See, personally, that I would say. Yeah, I would say integrated systems are probably going to be incentivized more and there's going to be more of an effort to sort of demonstrate why. And of course, there's probably Going to be like a minimum size. Like if you have a very small grower, not going to.

Willy Stober [00:48:39]:
They're not going to force you to buy, you know, super expensive, large piece of equipment. But there will be more of a push towards having these integrated systems and then secondly having the. In the controls that are set up to properly monitor and control these spaces. And I don't, there's not. I don't know if there's really a precedent in code for this, but I would say, you know, besides just monitoring the temperature and humidity of your space, like H VAC units typically do, the H vac system should be controlled at the same sort of central brain as your irrigation, as your AROYA, as your CO2, as your lighting. So that, yeah, you get this understanding of the interaction of everything. Because part of code's purpose is to, despite what people may think, the overarching goal is to help consumers out. That's the whole.

Willy Stober [00:49:46]:
To protect consumers. And in this instance, I believe at this point that assuming it's properly designed and implemented, you get a better bang for your buck spending the money on an integrated system that's capable of operating at a wide range of conditions versus a decoupled system that might be substantially cheaper at first, but if you look at it over five years, you're probably better off with the thing that can keep more stable environments. So that's kind of the intent of code. And I, yeah, I'm speaking a little cagely because I. There's probably going to be some controversy just, you know, around standalones and stuff, but as I said, I think there's always going to be a need for them. It's just, just. It's not really an opinion. It's like the science and the physics of everything show that you need a modular, a system that's capable of modulating over a wide range of conditions to serve a room which is creating a wide variety of conditions.

Willy Stober [00:50:55]:
So I would say that that's probably where code and you know, that we're talking like 20, 28 or something. So. So, yeah.

Jason [00:51:08]:
I think Willy's still going.

Willy Stober [00:51:09]:
No.

Jason [00:51:10]:
Are you still going?

Willy Stober [00:51:12]:
No, no, no.

Jason [00:51:12]:
Yeah, I was going to say, you know, one of the things that I really enjoy about helping people that have, you know, consolidated controls is the fact that they can start doing preventative or predictive type of controls where typically when we're standalone, you know, one piece of equipment doesn't know what may happen in the future. So anything that it's doing is reactive. And when we're on a reactive basis, we're almost always going to see a larger offset. Right. Because we don't have the opportunity to make adjustments before that happens. You know, when we think about, you know, let's say we have to irrigate to 20% runoff one day when we're used to doing 5% runoff. Well, you know, we may actually push our humidity down just slightly before we do that because we're going to see that increased water load in the room. Right.

Jason [00:52:04]:
Can't happen when we're on discrete equipment. That equipment only sees the increase in load and then responds to it. It doesn't have the ability to, you know, so it could be plus or minus 5% humidity or we could be, you know, only plus 10%.

Seth [00:52:18]:
In your example, like let's say adding 20% water to that room at a specific time of the day. It's quite impactful with humidity. And we can easily make the choice whether to, you said ramp that up, ramp it down. Simple decisions like how close to lights off am I going to water? How does that watering impact humidity and what's my control capability for it? You know, like we have clients that have over capacity systems. They'll run something like a Hugo a 6 by 6 by 6 and push mass amounts of runoff all day. It's not an issue. Other, other clients, hey, never water more than two hours after lights off. Why? Well, your, your D hues aren't going to keep update.

Seth [00:52:54]:
Your lights are going to shut off. You're have a massive humidity spike. Like you're going to spend so many hours trying to dial in those set points when the cause of that was just your decision to irrigate a little bit too late in the day. And back to what Jason said, if you have a, and you will, a consolidated system, as soon as you can start having things work in concert, you save yourself so many error points. Like if you've got to go do set point adjustments every single day before lights off. What is that, 60, 65 chances to mess it up, you know, provided like your life allows you to like be there till that exact time every day, make those switches at lights off. Well, yeah, it's, it's kind of a no brainer when you talk about like expanding that to like, okay, how do we scale this and make it operational? But also, you know, from a regulatory standpoint, I really wonder when we're going to start looking at, you know, responsible business metrics and saying, hey, yes, you can put up this facility, but unless you have a business plan to produce for under a certain price per pound, let's say, or whatever metric you're going to put on it. Is that even a responsible choice to put in our community? You know, and not, not like pushing it towards total socialization, but in community, city, county planning, like everything like that's taken into account.

Seth [00:54:09]:
We don't necessarily want to be putting in a bunch of businesses that aren't going to make it, you know. Right, right. Where we live here, we're right on the state border. There's certain businesses you should do in Washington, certain ones you should do in Idaho for various different reasons. But you'd be silly to get it wrong when you go to build your building, you know.

Willy Stober [00:54:28]:
Right, totally. Yeah. It goes towards. Yeah, the idea of regulation is to protect people from themselves sometimes. So. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. Jason, I love that idea of predictive controls and also sort of like intelligent preventative maintenance I think is the word they're using because yeah, the, the having everything integrated consolidated is the first step in being able to apply procedures such as that.

Willy Stober [00:55:00]:
And I think that's kind of like the state of the art, cutting edge things that will start to be happening probably more and more hopefully in the coming years. And you know, with the preventative maintenance, you might be able to have intelligence in the system to like, oh, you see your, your compressor cycling a certain way, it's giving off some sort of signature that usually indicates it's probably going to fail within the next two weeks. And so you could save yourself a pretty calamitous event by, by taking action before and then the preventive or the predictive controls. I. Yeah, these spaces are built for that because they're complicated, but they're very regimented. So it's like, you know, what's going to happen on growth cycle day six versus growth cycle day 25. Right. You know, you know what's going to happen.

Willy Stober [00:55:49]:
So theoretically, you could have your H Vac system ramp up before it starts to show up on the thermostat. So, yeah, I think those are two really exciting possibilities.

Seth [00:56:01]:
Oh yeah. And just utilizing technology, I'm glad you brought up, you know, being able to just look at power consumption or feed to a device and see that it's going to fail. Like, hey, this is producing a, you know, right back to pattern recognition. This is a weird pattern. Um, there's kind of this gap I find a lot of growers have because you're, you know, yes, you're operating a farm, but it's also an industrial factory on a certain level. You've got a lot of equipment to operate. So there's certain things like ground resistance checks and stuff like that that are, you know, more popular or not more popular required at certain bigger production facilities if you're in a more industrial setting that aren't necessarily being required by regulation in cannabis because of where it falls between ag and industrial production. But there's a lot of small wins in just utilizing some of this electronic monitoring equipment to identify that, you know, like right there.

Seth [00:56:53]:
If I was going to go Dr. Ground checks on a facility that's, you know, anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes per motor in your facility. Okay. Start counting up electric motors in your facility.

Jason [00:57:03]:
Yeah.

Seth [00:57:04]:
What if you can do that just by pulling up a screen on your computer and see if anything's like behaving weirdly? That's. That's such a huge win. And it's totally technologically, that's tiny.

Willy Stober [00:57:15]:
Yeah, it just helps with troubleshooting so much. Sorry, go ahead.

Cian [00:57:19]:
I was just going to say I kind of want to keep the conversation going as long as possible, but I feel obliged to wrap us up before too long here so we don't run over time. I did want to throw one quick question out from one of our guests live today. Iron Armor, one of our regulars said. Great episode, guys. Quick question. What are some systems that would integrate your AC D hum and humidifier together?

Willy Stober [00:57:44]:
I think like microclimates. Does it. It's something that I'm hoping to offer here pretty soon. I don't know if I'm allowed to like self promote or something, but yeah.

Cian [00:57:57]:
That'S kind of what I hit Willy at engineering.

Willy Stober [00:58:00]:
Yeah, yeah. So that's exactly what I'm working on is I'm working at the facility in Sacramento to kind of do something like that. So me potentially, I know microclimates, I think does it already and there's probably a couple other companies that do it and then also just individuals who are integrators who could under. There's this guy that I work with, Jeff Landreth, he could do that now. He's really good. So yeah, that would be some. He's just like kind of a unique engineer who knows how to do that on any type of system. So yeah, I would say there's a couple companies out there that do it and then there's individuals, one that I know of that can already do it and then hopefully me here pretty soon.

Seth [00:58:51]:
Well, I think that's an important thing to highlight, Willy, is that, you know, we're talking about just this concept of, you know, consolidated holistic Control of the environment, irrigation, everything that's going into controlling everything we can about how these plants grow. You're talking about a pretty wide range of industries and manufacturers and vendors that all, you know, they produce technology that crosses over into other industries. So it's, it's kind of unreasonable expectation to think that one particular company is going to grab and own this. And much like other sectors of manufacturing and farming and really any industrial activity, we're. The specialization is necessary. You know. Yes, it's 2025. We live in a digital world.

Seth [00:59:34]:
It's awesome. There's still a lot of connection points that have to be done manually. And when you start to quantify the amount of time you spend battling like a standalone decoupled system with five other standalone systems in your facility versus just paying someone that actually knows how to hit the ground running and make it work correctly from the beginning or is able to walk you through and solve those problems for you is huge. You know, if you hit the ground running and you have a com, you know, you have a system that by specs should be able to put out 95 plus grams of square foot and you're hitting 30 because you can't get the controls down. Like, man, to me, like, you know, I know everyone's got a different checkbook, different bank account, but like put. Yeah, like that, that seems pretty obvious, man. Just get the expertise. There's no, there's no, nothing wrong with not having the pride.

Seth [01:00:21]:
Like, I don't. Jason here knows bounds more than me. There's just so much more on system integrations and stuff like that. But it's because he spent time doing it a lot. There's value in that. Just, just like yourself. Like we could talk all day about environment. Do we need to talk about like plant chemistry now? That's not important to this conversation.

Seth [01:00:42]:
And you know, so you spend so much more time specializing on how to make these systems work efficiently that there's no way I could catch up to what you're doing without like changing careers. And that's, you know, that's fine. Everyone has that place in their life. It's important to just recognize where you bring the most value and where you need to bring some help in.

Cian [01:01:01]:
We all bring different skills to the table, right?

Seth [01:01:04]:
Yep.

Willy Stober [01:01:04]:
Yeah. 100 agree. I, I do think it's this, that application that work is maybe better suited for individuals, talented individuals at this point because each facility is so kind of custom and one off that these companies that try to appeal to everyone might not, you know, it. It's it becomes harder and. Yeah, maybe micro.

Cian [01:01:29]:
One size fits all. Doesn't truly fit. All right.

Willy Stober [01:01:32]:
No, exactly. So, well, guys, yeah, I think it's.

Cian [01:01:36]:
Clear we could probably go on for another couple hours here, but I do have to end this out for the day, guys, thank you so much. Awesome conversation. Willy, thank you for coming on today. Everyone that's tuned in today, if you get a chance, check out Willy's paper. Willy, you said you're gonna, you're gonna go there for a little sign off.

Seth [01:01:59]:
Let's get the plug.

Willy Stober [01:02:00]:
Sorry, go. Where are you? You cut it.

Cian [01:02:02]:
Oh, you just started talking. I wanted to lend you, lend you the floor for a second there.

Seth [01:02:06]:
Chris is dropping a link into the chat here, so yeah, go ahead and describe it. Will he plug what we're linking to?

Willy Stober [01:02:13]:
Oh, yeah. So this is the paper that I spoke of that I worked on for the last two years. It's pretty dense, so if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. But there's some good stuff in there, but covers the whole gamut of growing and thermal loads and energy consumption and all the interesting stuff we found. So, yeah, it's publicly available. I sent you the. Or the link's about to be sent. So yeah.

Seth [01:02:44]:
Awesome.

Cian [01:02:45]:
Thanks, Julie.

Seth [01:02:46]:
Check it out, guys. You're going to be hard pressed to get, I think better, more current information on what, you know, what the research is showing in some of these controlled environments and what the best ways are to actually try to control them.

Cian [01:03:00]:
Yeah, absolutely. Seth, Jason, thank you, Willy. Thank you guys. Thank our producer Chris and everyone out there watching today. Thank you guys for tuning in to what has been a really fun episode. To just sit here and talk with industry expert Willy Stober. Do you guys ever end up looking down the rabbit hole of these consolidated control systems? Make sure to look, look Willy up here. He's going to be the industry authority that we know.

Cian [01:03:31]:
Guys, thanks for tuning in to episode 134. We'll see you guys next week. Remember to give us a like and we'll make sure to get back to our normally scheduled question and answer this next week when we log back in. Thanks you guys for another great episode.